Modern Astronomy: Lives of the Stars

Modern Astronomy: Lives of the Stars Presented by Dr Helen Johnston School of Physics Spring 2016 The University of Sydney Page There is a course web site, at http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~helenj/LivesoftheStars.html where I will put • PDF copies of the lectures as I give them • lecture recordings • copies of animations • links to useful sites Please let me know of any problems! The University of Sydney Page 2 This course is a deeper look at how stars work. 1. Introduction: A tour of the stars 2. Atoms and quantum mechanics 3. What makes a Star? 4. The Sun – a typical Star 5. Star Birth and Protostars 6. Stellar Evolution 7. Supernovae 8. Stellar Graveyards 9. Binaries 10. Late Breaking News The University of Sydney Page 3 There will be an evening of star viewing in the Blue Mountains, run by A/Prof John O’Byrne on Saturday 29 October Details of where to go and how to get there are in a separate handout. John has also offered to show some of the night-sky using our telescope on the roof of this building, during one of the lectures in November (date to be determined). If the weather is good, I will do a short lecture that evening, and we’ll go to the roof around 7:30 pm. The University of Sydney Page 4 Lecture 1: Stars: a guided tour Prologue: Where we are and The nature of science you are here When we look at the night sky, we see a vista dominated by stars. If we look with a large telescope, we can see much fainter objects, and most of the faint ones turn out to be entire galaxies. Each of these galaxies is made up of trillions of stars, together with loose clouds of gas and dust that occupy the space between the stars. NGC 3982 from Hubble Our own Galaxy – the Milky Way – is just such a galaxy, except that (being inside it) we have had to deduce its shape. When you look up at the night sky, nearly everything you see is inside the Milky Way. All these glorious objects are the subject of this course. We will see how our Galaxy is a thriving eco-system, where stars are born, live their lives, and die, and in each stage affecting the environment for other stars. I will not be taking a historical approach, but describing what we know now. But everything I tell you is based on observations, often long and painstaking. The University of Sydney Page 12 long chain of long chain of long chain of indirect reasoning, direct reasoning, less reasoning, high observation, informed observation confidence confidence high confidence guesswork Confidence how jets how how stars stars evolve some stars are form supernovae work in binaries explode The University of Sydney Page 13 There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. – Donald Rumsfeld, 2002 The University of Sydney Page 15 Properties of the stars When we look at stars, we see brightness and colour. We need to make careful measurements to work out fundamental properties: • luminosity (true brightness) • temperature • size • mass It took astronomy thousands of years to get to this point. The University of Sydney Page 18 Stars are identified by their spectral type, which is a letter-number combination, based on features in their spectra. O B A F G K M The University of Sydney Page 20 Plotting the intensity as a function of wavelength, we can see that not only does the light shift towards bluer wavelength as we go from M stars to O and B stars, but the strength and types of the absorption lines change as well. The University of Sydney Page 21 Stars all have very nearly the same composition: the differences in their spectra are almost entirely due to temperature. The University of Sydney Page 22 The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram If we examine the intrinsic properties of stars – their brightness, temperature, and mass – we quickly notice that there are patterns in the way stars are made up. Explaining these correlations has been one of the main focuses of 20th century astronomy; we’ll be exploring the reasons in the next few weeks. Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell plotted the brightness of stars against their colour, in a diagram which now bears their names. The University of Sydney Page 23 bright This is an H-R diagram using data from the Hipparcos satellite, which measured distances to over 100,000 stars. Patterns are immediately apparent in where stars lie. brightness faint blue red The University of Sydney temperature Page 24 90% of stars fall on the main sequence, a narrow strip running from cool and faint to hot and bright. The University of Sydney Page 25 Most of the remaining stars lie in a band from faint(ish) and yellow to extremely bright and red. To be both cool and very bright, these giants stars must be enormous: the subgiants giants. The University of Sydney Page 26 Even brighter than the giants, and hence even larger, are the supergiants, which occupy a region supergiants across all colours. The University of Sydney Page 27 Then there are some stars below the main sequence, which are very hot and very faint, which must mean they are very small – the white dwarfs. white dwarfs The University of Sydney Page 28 O B A F G K M supergiants Here are all those regions together, as well as the spectral classes indicated across the top. giants In this lecture, we’re going to main subgiants sequence take a tour around these (dwarfs) various types of stars, to see what they are like up close and personal. white dwarfs The University of Sydney Page 29 The main sequence Let’s start with the main sequence, which makes up the bulk of stars. This is a band of stars running across the diagram. This means that the temperature of the star is correlated with its brightness – as stars get hotter, they also get brighter. The University of Sydney Page 30 It is hard to contemplate just how much the brightness of stars varies from one end of the main sequence to the other. The brightest star is more than 50,000 times brighter than the Sun, while the faintest is a million times fainter. To light the day with a faint M star, we would have to orbit at a distance of 150,000 km – half the distance to the Moon. Around a bright O star, we would need to orbit at a distance of 200 AU – five times the distance to Pluto – to receive the same amount of light we get from our Sun. The University of Sydney Page 31 O B A F G K M M and K stars: the coolest stars Let’s start our tour with the coolest stars, in the bottom right-hand corner: the M and K dwarf stars. The University of Sydney Page 32 M stars are extremely common, so that even though their masses are small (a few tenths of a solar mass), they make up about half of the mass of stars in the Galaxy. For every A star like Sirius, there are 100 M stars; for every O star, there are 1.7 million M stars. It is surprising, then, to learn that there is not a single M star visible to the naked eye. K stars have masses between roughly 0.5 and 0.7 times the Sun’s mass, and there are about 1/6 as many of them as there are M stars. The University of Sydney Page 33 The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri (which may be in orbit around the binary α Centauri) is an M5 star. Despite being at the same distance, it is 11 magnitudes fainter than the brightest star, α Cen A, which is almost a twin to our own Sun. α Cen B, the fainter member of the α Centauri binary, is a K1 dwarf. α Cen A and B are both hidden in the glare; The University of Sydney Proxima is arrowed at the lower right. Page 34 The diameter of Proxima Cen is 1/7th that of the Sun, or just 1.5 times Jupiter. Its distance from α Cen is 15,000 AU (0.21 ly), and it is probably bound, with an orbital period of about 500,000 years. The University of Sydney Page 35 The star with the highest known proper motion, Barnard’s Star, which is zipping along at an astounding 10.4 arc seconds per year, is also an M5 star. The University of Sydney Page 36 Amongst other notable K dwarf stars: 61 Cygni, the first “star” to have its parallax measured, is actually a pair of K dwarfs, K5–K7. The faint star Gliese 710 is a 9th magnitude K7 or M1 star, which is currently 19 pc away. It is approaching the Sun, and will come within nearly 1 light-year of the Sun, about 1.5 million years from now. At its closest, it will reach 0.6 The University of Sydney magnitude. Page 37 The temperatures of M stars are about 2000–4000 K. This is cool enough to allow molecules to form in their atmospheres; in hotter stars the atoms have enough energy to break molecular bonds, so K stars don’t show as many molecular lines in their spectra.

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